New Zealand Secondary School Squash Nationals
Last weekend Christchurch Girls' High School / Te Kura o Hine Waiora sent a team away to the New Zealand Secondary School Squash Nationals, held in Auckland.
The team consisted of myself (Petra Curd-McCullough), Tanisha Butt, Lily McGonigal, Jess Shearer and Ellla Stronach.
Sadly the day before our flight Ella got sick and wasn’t able to attend the tournament leaving us short a player. Despite this we played our first game on Friday and all members of our team won their game.
This resulted in an overall win for our team progressing us through to the championship draw. The next two rounds, we all versed players of similar abilities, despite the matches being very close our team ended up losing our next 2 rounds. After this I had to pull out as I became sick, leaving our team down to ⅗ players.
This meant that the following games for our team were going to be very tough and we ended up losing both of these rounds as well. Despite losing a couple of our players we managed to finish up 8th in the competition, one below where we were seeded.
This tournament was also a selection tournament for the New Zealand Secondary School Trans-Tasmin Team which is travelling to Australia next Sunday to compete. This made the tournament even more important for myself and Tanisha Butt as we both got shortlisted for this team. Due to the large competition at the event Tanisha just missed out on making the team and I got named as the third player and the NZ girls team captain.
A big thank you to the teacher in charge of squash, Ms Lawrence, who helped organise the team. Thanks for also travelling with us alongside the parent help Helen Curd-McCullough, you guys made the trip much more enjoyable and memorable.
The attached is a link to the Squash NZ Facebook page which formally announces the NZSS Squash team